I’ve been using Microsoft Visio for a very long time, and it’s still my tool of choice when creating architecture diagrams. Since PowerPoint on the Mac has been massively improved I do use that more often, but you can’t beat Visio for the more detailed diagrams. With that, it has been almost 3 years since I shared my last EUC Visio stencil set so I decided it’s time for an update for 2018. I do intend to add a lot more shapes to this set as I create them. Many of these are from existing Visio Stencils available online (see links below), whereas others are ones I’ve collected over the years or had to create myself. You can see all of the shapes and icons included in this Visio Stencil Set in the image above.

Earlier this month (January 2018) VMware released Horizon 7.4, and with that I wanted to share some updates in regard to the network port requirements. My good colleagues over in the EUC Technical Marketing team are doing a fine job of maintaining the diagram and have recently published a white paper PDF which you’ll find here. It’s a beast of a document and highly recommended if you are deploying a VMware Horizon architecture in your environment.

An important consideration when using this network ports diagram, is that it doesn’t necessarily contain all non-VMware related ports such as Active Directory, DNS, NTP, SMB and so on. In fact one of my colleagues in the Office of the CTO mentioned this, since one of his customers ran into an issue where TCP port 135 was blocked, but this was required when joining a Pod to a federation (Cloud Pod Architecture). I thought this would be a good opportunity to describe what Cloud Pod Architecture is doing behind the scenes and provide some updates. [Read more…] about VMware Horizon 7.4 Network Ports for Cloud Pod Architecture

Today VMware has publicly announced the integration of Horizon Cloud with Microsoft Azure. As you may know, Horizon Cloud is available in two deployment models today; on-premises or cloud hosted. On-premises deployments take advantage of what was formely known as Project Enzo, where hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) can be deployed in your own data centers, but leveraging the cloud control plane which is managed by VMware and hosted with IBM SoftLayer. The other option is to deploy desktops to a fully managed Horizon Cloud where you don’t need to host any infrastructure of your own in order to manage the virtual desktops or applications.

Available in the second half of 2017, we will now have the option to host desktops with Azure. This is another leap for VMware’s cross-cloud strategy, and it allows customers to take advantage of Microsofts massive data center footprint. This also means customers can split their deployments between on-premises and the public cloud.

I have been fortunate enough to have been working closely with our EUC R&D team and spent some time with them to understand the key components and architecture behind this new announcement. I am sure in the coming months we’ll be releasing more information, and stay tuned for VMworld!

I frequently get asked questions on the new Horizon API module for PowerCLI 6.5 (R1), so I thought I’d share some of my notes on getting started with this incredibly useful new API for Horizon. It is hard to imagine working with any virtualization or cloud technology without adding API functionality into the mix. I use the Dropbox API to store database backups for this very blog. I heavily rely on the API provided by DigitalOcean, who hosts the Linux VPS this blog is running on. After speaking to some of my friends in VMware Professional Services, it suddenly dawned on me how a large part of their day is helping customers use APIs for our products. It has come along in leaps and bounds compared to the older SDKs and APIs available a few years back.

You don’t need to be a coder to take advantage of the Horizon API, but mastering the basics of scripting and API interaction is key to becoming a successful VMware guru!

I recently published a white paper aimed at service providers offering VMware Horizon 7 for tenants adopting the digital workspace. Horizon 7 is a single-tenanted VDI and application platform, allowing IT administrators to manage not only desktop pools, but application delivery to their end-users.

The ‘digital workspace’ isn’t just a marketing term, it’s actually a “consumer simple” digital platform for end-users accessing their day to day and most critical applications. Underneath the hood, however, is a VDI architecture that has evolved and long since the days of the traditional desktop broker.

This white paper breaks down the digital workspace into five distinct layers, which have a direct correlation to tenant-facing functionality, service provider boundaries (for instance, firewall ports, user portal integration), core and management infrastructure.